After I wrote my previous piece analyzing the Harvard faculty’s choice to impose a cap on A grades for undergraduates, I started thinking more broadly about the effects of grade inflation, some obvious and some less so. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the extent to which thousands of overly generous marking decisions, made individually, not only affect students, but also extend outward to parents, institutions, and ultimately society as a whole.
Yes, in the short term, students may get their perfect report cards, teachers and administrators may avoid parental ire, and colleges may keep enrollment figures up and tuition dollars rolling in, but at what cost?
So here goes my list of the all parties to whom grade inflation ultimately does a disservice.
It hurts students because it keeps them in a state of illusion about what and how much they have learned.
It hurts students because it deprives them of the triumph of knowing their A’s genuinely signals mastery of difficult material.
It hurts students because deep down they suspect they don’t deserve the grades they’ve been given, causing them to mistrust themselves and their teachers.
It hurts students because it underestimates what sort of setbacks they are capable of tolerating, depriving them of the opportunity to practice managing minor disappointments and leaving them less prepared for work and life.
It hurts students by making them feel as if anything short of perfection is unacceptable, making them both anxious and entitled.
It hurts students because it makes them cynical and dismissive about the value of effort—why bother to hold yourself to a high standard when so many other people get the same perfect grades for lower quality work?
It hurts students because it gives them the false impression that they are prepared for college and/or particular majors when in fact they are not.
it hurts selective college applicants because it forces them to to stand out in other areas in ever more extreme and time-consuming ways.
It hurts parents because it deprives them of the opportunity to recognize their children are struggling and obtain help.
It hurts parents financially because it causes them to believe that tuition is a worthwhile investment at colleges that their child is unlikely to graduate from; it hurts students financially by saddling them with debt for degrees that they cannot complete.
It hurts instructors because it forces them to compromise their standards and their sense of ethics.
It hurts instructors because they lose respect from students who sense they are being pandered to.
It hurts instructors by forcing them to engage in a type of remediation they are not trained for, and that is outside the bounds of their normal professional duties.
It hurts college and universities because it devalues their diplomas and makes them even more suspect in the eyes of the public.
It hurts employers because they lack reliable information about what skills job applicants have actually acquired.
It hurts employers because younger workers may have little experience tolerating honest feedback, even when presented kindly.
It hurts society because it produces a mass of purportedly educated citizens who overestimate what they know.
It hurts society because it contributes to a general atmosphere of unreality, in which effort and quality are detached from outcomes, and in which underlying problems are never acknowledge or confronted directly but continually ignored or minimized.